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Caroline Venable has everything her Southern heritage promised: money, prestige, a powerful husband--and a predictable routine of country-club luncheons, cocktail parties, and dinners hosting her husband's wealthy friends, clients, and associates in his successful land-developing conglomerate. To escape her stifling routine, Caro drinks a little too much. But her true solace is the Lowcountry island her beloved Granddaddy left her--an oasis of breathtaking beauty that is home to a band of wild ponies. When Caro learns that her husband must develop the island or lose the business, she is devastated. The Lowcountry is her heritage--and what will happen to the ponies whose spirit and freedom have captivated her since childhood? Saving the island could cost Caroline more than she ever imagined. To succeed, she must confront the part of herself numbed by alcohol and careful avoidance--and shatter long-held ideals about her role in society, her marriage, and ultimately, herself.

Low Country

Chapter One

"I think I'll go over to the island for a few days," I said to my husband at breakfast, and then, when he did not respond, I said, "The light's beautiful. It can't last. I hate to waste it. We won't get this pure gold again until this time next year."

Clay smiled, but he did not put down his newspaper, and he did not speak.The smile made my stomach dip and rise again, as it has for the past twenty-five years. Clay's smile is wonderful, slow and unstinting and a bit crooked, and gains much of its power from the surrounding austerity of his sharp, thin face. Over the years I have seen it disarm a legion of people, from two-year-olds in mid-tantrum to Arab sheiks in same. Even though I knew that this smile was little more than a twitch, and with no more perception behind it, I felt my own mouth smiling back. I wondered, as I often do, how he could do that, smile as though you had absolutely delighted him when he had not heard a word you said.

"There is a rabid armadillo approaching you from behind," I said. "It's so close I can see the froth. It's not a pretty sight."

"I heard you," he said. "You want to go over to the island because the light's good. It can't last."

I waited, but he did not speak again, or raise his eyes.

Finally I said, "So? Is that okay with you?"

This time he did look up.

"Why do you ask? You don't need my permission to go over to the island. When did I ever stop you?"

His voice was level and reasonable; it is seldom anything else. I knew that he did not like me to go over to the island alone, though, for a number of reasons that we had discussed and one that we had not, yet.

The island is wild and largely undeveloped now, except for a tiny settlement on its southwestern tip, and there are wild animals living on it that are hostile to humans, and sometimes dangerous. It is home to a formidable colony of alligators, some more than twelve feet long, and a handful of wild boar that make up in ferocity what they lack in numbers. Rattlesnakes and water moccasins are a given. Even the band of sullen wild ponies that have lived there on the grassy hummocks between the creeks and inlets since time out of mind are not the amiable toys they seem. A small child from the settlement was badly kicked only last year, when he got too close to a mare nursing her foal. Clay knows that I have been handling myself easily and well on the island since I was a child, but he mistrusts what he calls my impetuosity more than he trusts my long experience and exemplary safety record.

Then there is the settlement itself, Dayclear. That beautiful word is Gullah, part of the strange and lyrical amalgam of West African and Colonial English once spoken by the handful of Gullah blacks still living in pockets of the south Carolina Lowcountry. They are the descendants of the slaves brought here by the first white settlers of these archipelagos and marshes, and some of the elders still speak the old patois among themselves. When I was a child I knew some of it myself, a few words taught me by various Gullahnurses and cooks, a few snatches of songs sung by gardeners and handymen on my grandfather's place. I know that Dayclear means "dawn." I have always loved the word, and I have always been aware of the settlement,even if I did not often visit it when I was growing up and have no occasion to do so now. I do know that it is made up now largely of the old, with a preponderance of frail old women, and that some of them must be the kin of those workers of my childhood, if not the actual people themselves. I know that there are virtually no young men and women living there, since the young leave the island as soon as they are physically able to do so,to seek whatever fortunes they might find elsewhere. There is nothing for them in Dayclear. There are children, small ones, left behind with the old women by daughters and granddaughters who have taken flight, and there are sometimes silent, empty-faced young men about, who have come home because they are in trouble and have, temporarily, nowhere else to go, but they do not stay long.

I have not been to the settlement for many years, as my route across the island lies in the dry, hummocky heart of it, and the house to which I go is at the opposite end, looking northwest toward the shore of Edisto. But when I think of it, I feel nothing but a kind of mindless, nostalgic sense of safety and benevolence. Dayclear has never given me anything but nurturing and love.

Clay fears it, though. He has never said so, but I know that he does. I can tell; I always know when Clay is afraid, because he so seldom is, and of almost nothing.

"There's nothing there that can hurt me; nobody who would," I have said to him. "They're just poor old women and babies and children."

"You don't know who's back in there," he said. "You don't see who comes and goes. Anybody could come across. There are places you could wade across. Anybody could drop anchor in the Inland Waterway and come ashore. You think everybody in that little place doesn't know when you're at the house, and that you're by yourself? I don't like it when you go, Caro. But you know that."

Excerpted from Low Country by Anne Rivers Siddons All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.